Wendy Lecker: CT should slow down on NCLB waiver

Updated 10:08 am, Thursday, February 2, 2012

Editor's note: This is the first of a new column in which Stamford resident Wendy Lecker will address state and national education issues. Her education policy credentials, in addition to those mentioned below, include working for the national Rural Schools and Community Trust, and Connecticut Voices for Children, where she investigated resource disparity among Connecticut public schools. The column will appear in this space every other week.

Last March, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan addressed Congress about the flaws in the No Child Left Behind Law. He called NCLB "fundamentally broken," and said its "one-size-fits-all solutions" usurped the ability of local and state officials to tailor policies to individual schools or students.

Moreover, the steep increases in Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), schools' yearly testing targets, meant states intervened in more schools each year, "implementing the exact same interventions regardless of the schools' individual needs."

Duncan intimated that these problems in NCLB were uncovered during its 10 years of implementation. However, the problems were known from its inception.

From the beginning, almost everyone, except Congress, recognized the fallacy of measuring and punishing schools based on one yearly set of standardized tests.

In July 2001, prior to NCLB's enactment, Thomas Kane, a scholar from the right-leaning Hoover Institution, together with Douglas Staiger and Jeffrey Geppert, pointed out almost every pitfall in AYP: the inappropriate one-size-fits-all remedies, its inaccurate measures of school performance, the possibility for error, the reality that more diverse schools would be punished for their diversity alone, and the inevitability of most schools failing to make AYP eventually.

The scholars urged Congress to slow down. Although there was an urgent need for improvement, they countered that "impatience is an insufficient excuse for bad education policy."

Nonetheless, Congress passed the law, the Bush and Obama administrations oversaw its implementation, and the predicted damaging outcomes occurred.

The logical response to the realization that NCLB is flawed would be to freeze the AYP targets for all states until Congress has a chance, during the reauthorization process, to give the law the attention it should have given it in 2001. As Montana's schools chief noted in a letter to Duncan, freezing AYP "would have been beneficial to every state, district and school and have provided relief from the most onerous portion of the current federal law."

Instead. Duncan has offered "flexibility" from NCLB targets for those states that agree to a specific set of new requirements.

Unfortunately, these new requirements may be as onerous and expensive, if not more so, than NCLB itself. States must adopt new curricula, new tests, new sanctions/supports for the 15 percent lowest scoring schools, must link teacher and principal evaluations to standardized test scores, and instead of all students being "proficient" by 2014, all students must be "college ready" by 2020.

California has estimated that it will cost the state over $2 billion to implement the mandates attached to this "flexibility."

Montana found that the requirements would cost the state millions of extra dollars and the "reforms" required were not in students' best educational interests. Montana declined this NCLB "replacement program" because it did "not make educational or financial sense." Montana had informed the federal government months earlier that it would freeze its AYP targets for this year anyway, and suffered no repercussions.

Nebraska and Wyoming also have expressed reservations about these NCLB "waivers."

Now, Connecticut's state Department of Education has decided to request this "flexibility." It seeks to submit an application by Feb. 21, less than one month away.

Prior to submitting its application, shouldn't Connecticut look at what it may be getting us into?

In 2004, Connecticut considered suing the federal government over the onerous costs of the NCLB mandates. Before making that decision, the state commissioned a cost study of NCLB.

Now, two states have already found that this "flexibility" will cost up to billions of dollars. Before signing up for these new mandates, Connecticut must assess their cost to taxpayers.

The U.S. Department of Education requires that states receive "meaningful input" from the public about their flexibility requests. These mandates require massive changes in curriculum, testing and teaching. For example, linking test scores to teacher evaluation means that children would now have to endure standardized tests in every subject.

So far, the "input" the state Department of Education seeks consists of a web address to write to, found on a page of the DOE's website. However, the DOE has not made any draft application available for review. It is impossible to give meaningful input on the application without knowing its contents.

I called and emailed the DOE's communications director to inquire about any other possibilities for public input prior to the Feb. 21 deadline. I received no reply.

Connecticut residents need ample opportunity to review the details of the NCLB flexibility application, before it is submitted, and to weigh in on their potential fiscal and educational impact.

When it comes to the future of our children and communities, we must look before we leap. As those scholars warned in 2001, "impatience is an insufficient excuse for bad education policy."

Wendy Lecker is a former president of the Stamford Parent Teacher Council, and was staff attorney at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, plaintiffs in a school funding lawsuit in New York.